Questione Meridionale and Global South: If the Italian South Meets Its Global Brother
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QUESTIONE MERIDIONALE AND GLOBAL SOUTH: IF THE ITALIAN SOUTH MEETS ITS GLOBAL BROTHER LUIGI CAZZATO Sommario Il saggio prova ad affrontare la vexata questio meridionale alla luce di quello che è stato il dibattito italiano negli ultimi anni a partire dai benevoli influssi degli studi postcoloniali e del cosiddetto “pensiero meridiano”. Partendo dall’imagery africana dominante (orientalista e non) con cui spesso il sud d’Italia è stato descritto (immagini legate all’idea di natura selvaggia e cultura arretrata), si cerca di leggere lo scontro avvenuto fra modernità e tradizione attraverso le categorie gramsciane egemonia/subalternità e l’ermeneutica del ri-morso di E. De Martino. Questo approccio sembra di interrogare e valutare meglio la storia del famigerato “ritardo” del Mezzogiorno, storicamente misurato attraverso i parametri “settentrionali” dell’ideologia modernista del progresso, e, soprattutto, di rimuovere quel velo culturale che impedisce di vedere la storia di questa regione del Mediterraneo come storia postcoloniale. Infine, si cerca di raccontare che cosa avviene quando il sud italiano (che è però nord del pianeta) e quello globale si incontrano, e che cosa questa esperienza potrebbe insegnare al pianeta, inteso demartinianamente, come terra globale del rimorso. The Mezzogiorno as the Italian Africa Let’s start with a scenario: the South-eastern point of Italy’s heel, further south-east than Naples, Paestum, Herculanæum and Pompeii, where most 102 English travellers used to end their Grand Tour and most gothic novel writers began their fictional one (Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, 1764; Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance, 1790). Exactly, we are in the Salento1. The year is 1959. In this remote corner of Italy, a scientific team led by the great Italian ethnologist Ernesto De Martino is conducting fieldwork for a study about ‘tarantism’, a form of possession believed to result from the bite of a mythical tarantula (‘spider’) and its ritual cure with the tarantella dance: Scorgemmo un capannello di gente davanti un basso, localizzammo subito la casata da cui giungevano i suoni: affrettammo il passo, fummo davanti la porta, ci facemmo largo tra la gente ricambiando con un ovvio sorriso i molti occhi in atto di chiedersi: “Chi sono questi forestieri?” e finalmente di punto in bianco, dal giorno alla notte, ci trovammo brutalmente sbalzati in un altro pianeta… Qui [a miserabile one-room dark dwelling], nei limiti segnati dalla bianca tela, si produceva la tarantata, anch’essa in bianco come la tela su cui danzava, la vita stretta da una fascia, la nera capigliatura tempestosamente sciolta e ricadente sul volto olivastro, di cui si intravedevano ostentatamente immobili e duri e gli occhi ora chiusi e ora socchiusi, come di sonnambola, mentre il chitarrista, il fisarmonicista, la tamburellista e il nostro barbiere-violinista si producevano a loro volta nella vibrante vicenda della terapia sonora. (De Martino 2002:66) 1 The Salento, a subregion of Apulia, is a South-Eastern region of Italy, separated from the Balkan Eastern coast by a narrow strech of sea, which cannot prevent you from seeing the opposite mountainous coast on clear days when the north wind blows. It is quite far from the North- African coast, but Africa nonetheless makes itself felt through the sandy winds that often push clouds full of Sahara sand up north, sometimes as far as Rome. 103 The world in which they were brutally cast was more or less the same as the one an 18th century eyewitness had once described in The Gentleman’s Magazine2. He was a musician who, strangely, was asked to play the violin to a man who had been found collapsed in the street. Not being familiar with the tarantella, he played a jig which failed to have any successful result. Then an elderly woman started to sing and the musician began to follow the tune, provoking a reaction: “the man began to move to the rhythm of the music, lifting himself to his feet like a thunderbolt, giving the appearance of a man who had awoken from a terrible vision, his gaze fixed and wild, with every joint of his body in motion”3. When the violin player stopped, the man dropped back to the floor in a convulsive fit. As soon as the player restarted playing, the man was back on his feet, dancing again like a spirited performer. The Neapolitan scholar, founding figure of Italian cultural anthropology, similarly witnessed the last remnants of ‘the strange malady’, an archaic pagan cultural phenomenon in the midst of a modernising Italy, shortly before the economic boom of the Sixties would explode. He called this land Terra del Rimorso. The translation of such an expression is a difficult one. We could simply say ‘land of remorse’ but this unfortunately would not maintain its twofold meaning: ‘rimorso’ can be both ‘regret’ and ‘re-bite’ (a ‘morso’ is a ‘bite’). Only if we interpret ‘rimorso’ as rebiting regret can we understand why De Martino considered this land as the land of the “cattivo passato che torna [and re- bites] e che si ripropone alla scelta mondana riparatrice” (De Martino 2 Speaking of this continuity and immobility of Italian socio-cultural environment, it is interesting to report what W.H. Auden said about post-Second World War and pre-French-Revolution Italy, in his introduction to Goethe’s Italian Journey: “I am amazed at their similarity. Is there any other country in Europe where the character of the people seems to have been so little affected by political and technological change?” (Auden 1970:8). 3 The Gentleman’s Magazine, August 1743, 13:422. 104 2002:272). In other words, the ethnologist maintained that tarantism had provided a liminal zone into which class and gender oppression – that is to say, erotic covert desires, frustrated hopes and unresolved grief – could be conveyed and settled through catharsis. The suspected spider’s bite, its summer re-surgence (re-bite), and the following dancing-beyond- exhaustion cure were just symbols of a ‘minor religion’, which had emerged in the medieval period (thanks to the widespread cultural connection with Arabs) and flourished until the 18th century. Such beliefs and practices have antecedents in ancient Greece (Dionysian cults) and parallels with many contemporary ‘ecstatic’ religions similar to some African cults conveyed by Islamic culture since the seventh century. This is one of the images of the ‘Italian Africa’ that so many Italian and foreign commentators have seen and spoken of for centuries4. The majority of foreigner travellers to Italy assumed for many centuries, as did the French poet Creuze de Lesser as late as the beginning of 19th century, that: “L’Europe finit à Naples et même elle y finit assez mal. La Calabre, la Sicile, tout le reste est de l’Afrique” (Mozzillo 1982:15). Madame de Staël in her novel Corinne ou l’Italie (1807) portrayed Naples and its “immense population, at once so animated and so indolent” as “something extremely original in this state of savage existence, mingled with civilization”. For some peculiar reason, their bad manners are somehow uncommon, “they are not boorish in the manner of other peoples. Their very coarseness strikes the imagination. The African shore which is on the other side of the sea can almost be felt already […]” (Madame de Staël 1998:187). A similar kind of exotic, African, uncouthness was seen in 4 When I speak of ‘Africa’ here, I am referring to the stereotypical image of the Mezzogiorno prevailing in Italy, which is largely associated with the northern and central part of the multifaceted African continent. It is an image connected with natural and creative beauty, wilderness, unconscious primitiveness, and from the 19th century onwards with backwardness (that is to say with the delayed progress as opposed to the hectic pace of the modernising process that swept the North-West of the peninsula and of the planet). 105 Apulia, where the Salento is located. Janet Ross was an English writer and businesswoman who settled in Tuscany in the second half of the 19th century, who hosted foreign travelers such as Mark Twain and Henry James, and occasionally travelled southwards. She found Apulia a wild and melancholic region. She praised its people for their wonderful Oriental look and behaviour. Its landscape reminded her of the African coast: “Qua e là una palma torreggia alta verso il cielo, piegando le sue foglie leggere come se si struggesse per il suo fratello lontano in Africa” (Cecere 1993:443). Not surprisingly, in such a landscape, magic appears, like in pagan Africa: “nessuna meraviglia che qui la gente creda nelle streghe e nella magia: le desolate distese della campagna, le forme fantastiche del carrubo […] le innumerevoli tombe, cripte e resti di antichi edifici sparsi un po’ dovunque, contribuiscono tutti ad impressionare una popolazione ignorante” (Cecere 1993:443). Putting aside her positivistic explanation of Apulian people’s temperament (they believe in magic because of the natural and architectural context), and her paternal, though not too indulgent, attitude towards the Apulian ignorant peasants, her northern Orientalist gaze joins Apulia and Africa together as sister regions, personifying their palm trees looking for each other, trying to restore their fraternal tie broken by the separating sea. If the roots of this Orientalist, Africanist gaze were foreign, native Italians followed the lead. In George Gissing’s account of his southwards ramblings as early as 1897 we can found another analogy between Africa and the Italian South, but this time it is a Neapolitan middle-class family that helps the foreign traveller to sketch it. When he reveals to his host his plan to get to Calabria, he provokes an astonished reaction: Both are astonished at my eccentricity and hardiness in undertaking a solitary journey through the wild South.